0513485001343534196 christopher fowler (33 page)

'This is Miss Amity's apartment.'

'Then who the hell are you?'

I explained. It was something I was obviously going to be doing a lot.

'Shit. Look, I'm gonna have to bring this damned thing around because it's making a hole in its box. You're Jewish, right?'

'How can you tell? Did you say an armadillo?'

'I can spot a nice Jewish boy like an eagle can see lambs in a canyon.

Are you married? Don't answer. I'll be there in twenty minutes. No, don't thank me, just pour me a drink. Whisky, rocks, Jim Beam if there's any left.'

I replaced the receiver, puzzled.

'Mary paints,' said Melissa, setting her glass on to a paper coaster I'd found. She stifled a giggle.

'What's funny?' I asked.

'She'd get a kick seeing you put down coasters. She's not that kind of person.'

'What do you mean? What kind of person?'

'You know, like Tony Randall in
The Odd Couple
. She lets her drinks leave little rings on the table.' Melissa crossed long, jean-clad legs. 'She likes to paint animals, but it's tough painting at the zoo with so many people around, so I told my brother to get her something. Well, he drove up from Tucson to see me, and he brought this.' She pointed to the armadillo. It was scratching around in a corner of its strawfilled box. The creature was about a foot long, and had funny bristling ears. It looked mechanical, hardly a living creature at all. 'I can't keep it in my apartment because I have cats.'

'What about Bolivar?' I asked. The dog was whining in the kitchen, scrabbling at the door.

'Oh, he'll be fine. You take good care of him, he's Mary's pride and joy. The armadillo can look after itself, trust me. It's nocturnal, and that's when it'll try to dig its way out. I've left it a box of insects and vegetables.

You just top it up with broccoli and cockroaches. But tell me about you, you adorable thing. You're English, single obviously.' She sat back and waited for me to talk.

Melissa originally came from Kansas, 'The Dorothy State', as she drily referred to it. She was as thin and brown as well-worn leather, her bony wrists covered in fat gold rope; someone who'd had a hard life and then found money. I like her from the first, which was just as well because she outstayed her welcome and got completely drunk. When I tried to get her to the door, she made a grab for my balls. 'Mary would like you,' she announced, 'but you need to get out more. Put that adorable face in the sun.'

I had to give the cab driver an extra ten dollars to take her. But that night I had my first decent eight-hour sleep in weeks.

The next morning was Sunday. I had a hangover, and was looking forward to a lie-in. There was a smell in the apartment beneath the ground-in cigarette smoke that I associated with my own childhood. It took me a while to realise that it was dampness, something I didn't associate with American homes, yet it made me feel comfortable and secure. Burrowing back into the blankets, my rest was rudely awakened by the front door slamming. I figured Carlos and Raoul were back, but then I heard different voices.

'
Xanadu
's fabulous. Olivia Newton-John as a Greek muse, all lip gloss and roller skates? It's been waiting fifteen years to be recognised as a classic, but the world is still not ready. You can learn so much about hair maintenance watching her.'

I pulled myself out of bed and opened the curtains. The day was warm and wet, the sidewalk empty and every bit as Sundayish as a residential English backstreet. The sky had adead, exhausted look. I listened to the lounge.

'Donald loses all his dates because of his terrible taste in movies,' said another voice. 'Just as they're starting to get along fine, he drags them off to see a double bill of something like
Grease 2
and
Yentl
.'

Making sure my pyjamas were not exposing anything, I ventured out of the bedroom. There were three strangers in the kitchen making coffee.

A muscular young man in a blacknylon T-shirt, a slender Asian boy wearing rather a lot of make-up for this time of the morning and an attractive, overweight girl with dyed black hair. They seemed as surprised to see me as I was them.

'Oh my God, we woke the maid,' cried the Max-Factored one. 'Who are you, honey? Did you know you got no hot water?'

'I'm Charles,' I explained. 'Yes, I did know. I'm looking after Miss Amity's apartment for her.'

'Well, Charlene, I'm sorry we woke you but Mary never mentioned anyone was staying here.'

'That's okay. I should be getting up anyway. Who are you?'

'Donald.' Mr Black T-shirt thumbed his chest. 'That's Jaffe, and Val's the female, gynaecologically speaking. Jaffe's still undergoing some kind of sexual identity crisis but the men are rooting for him, so he may get through it with just a few mascara burns. Your armadillo has escaped.'

Jaffe was wearing an extraordinary badge on his jacket, little pieces of broken mirror, an old Andrew Logan design from the eighties, and it kept catching the light, shimmying specks on to the nicotined ceiling like a disco ball. I saw that the armadillo was trying to dig its way out through the kitchen cabinets, away from the light. Fascinated, Bolivar was taking gentle snaps at the creature, as if trying to cradle it in his enormous jaws. I wanted to separate them, but I'd never touched an armadillo before.

'You can join us for brunch if you like,' Donald offered. 'We'll be discussing the movie career of Brad Pitt in depth, and you may wish to contribute something to that. Are you from Harvard or something? You have a funny accent.'

'I'm English,' I said apologetically, as you do. I wanted to ask why he had access to Mary's apartment, but could find no way of phrasing the question politely. At my feet the dog was whimpering in frustration and the armadillo was noisily butting its head against the units.

'So, Charlita, you going to join us for a glass of second-rate champagne and a Spanish meal presented between slices of cantaloupe?'

asked Jaffe.

'Thank you for the offer,' I replied, offended, 'but I have things to do.'

'He's so polite. I
love
it.'

'We're old friends of Mary's,' Val took the trouble to explain. 'We always come by on a Sunday. She reads our tarot, then arranges my astrological week. I can't go out of the house without it.'

'Well, she won't be able to do it for you today.'

'She already did.' Val held up a scroll of paper. 'She left it out for me.

What star-sign are you?'

'I don't believe in the stars,' I said testily. 'You have your own door keys for the apartment?'

Jaffe was defensive. 'Mary gives her keys to everyone. Don't think you're special.'

'What's she like?' I asked Val.

'Mary? A sweetie. Prickly as a cactus, soft as a pear. Bad at keeping secrets. Her parents were imprisoned by the Nazis. She's had a wild life.

Come with us, we'll tell you all about her.'

'No, really, thank you, I can't.'

'Your choice. You're gonna miss the dish.'

Laughing, they left. I don't know why I refused their offer. Their over-friendliness unnerved me. In such situations I invariably retreated.

After they had gone I wandered about the apartment wondering if I should clean it. I decided to wait until the bathroom was finished. The shower stall was filled with weird oils, dried flowers and glycerine soaps, none of which smelled very pleasant. Even in here there were buckled photographs taped on the walls. She seemed to have so many friends. I had virtually none. Bolivar was whining for a walk, and I was just about to take him when the telephone rang.

'Is that you, Charles?'

'Yes, it is,' I replied, instinctively knowing that this was Mary Amity.

'How are you settling in, dear?'

'Very well, thanks. I just wondered - forgive me for asking - how many people have you given your front door keys to?'

'I've never really counted. I could probably work it out. Do you need to know?'

'No, I was just thinking about security.'

'Darling, I have nothing worth stealing. My most precious possessions are all inside my head. Although if a woman called Sheryl-Ann tries to let herself in, you must stop her.'

'How do I do that?'

'Just put your foot against the door until you can get the chain on, that's what I always do. Then call the super. You'll recognise her easily, she looks like a hooker but I swear I had no idea she was when I gave her the keys. How is my Bolivar?'

'He's fine. He's - fine.' I looked down at Bolivar, who was trying to choke himself to death on the lead, torn between conflicting desires to torment the armadillo and get out on the street. 'How are you?'

'Thank you for asking. So polite. I've had the operation, I just have to lie here and heal. Take good care of him, won't you? Don't let him overeat. He'll eat absolutely anything. He ate a shovel once. Give me your work number, just in case.' She didn't explain in case of what, but I gave it to her. I was a guest in her apartment, after all.

'I wasn't able to get hold of Dean,' I explained. 'He was going to show me where everything was.'

'You're a big boy, you can find things out for yourself, can't you? You won't be hearing from Dean for a while. He's gone away.'

'Oh? He didn't tell me he was going -'

'Well, the truth is he's starting a jail sentence. It's not his fault. He's a good boy who's had some bad luck. Take my dog for a walk, will you?

He likes walks.'

•

'Hey, Bolivar, c'mere you big hunk of muscle!' screamed the waitress, pulling Bolivar's front paws up on her apron. It seemed unhygienic. This time, the dog had stopped sharply on a corner three streets from the apartment, then dragged me into a coffee shop called Manny's Freshly Brewed Sip 'N' Go. The waitress, a slender, pretty Puerto Rican girl with smoky eyes, butted heads with the dog, then dropped him back down.

'I'm Maria. Listen, the manager'll piss blood if he sees the dog in here.'

She laughed carelessly. 'The health board already hate him. They closed us down in '95 for having mice in the pan racks.'

'You know Miss Amity?'

'Oh sure. She used to teach tap over at this crummy little studio on West 46th. I wanted to be a dancer, but I really wasn't good enough.'

'Was she a dancer, then?'

'Once, long ago, out in Hollywood. Chorus stuff. Way before she took her accountancy exams and married that maniac, that crazy pianist.'

'She was married to a pianist?'

'Her second husband. The first one shot himself, but then I guess he had a good reason. Not that the pianist turned out any better. That was all before my time. Mary was sub-leasingthe studio from this guy who turned out to be some kind of gangster. He ran a luggage shop near the Marriot that was a front for a gambling syndicate, one of these places that sold suitcases, statues of Jesus and flick-knives, and had old Turkish guys in the back playing cards. He had to get out of town quick, and robbed the studio while everyone was in the tap class. Cleaned the place out of wallets, purses, jewelry, took all Mary's savings from the apartment. But he didn't get out in time, and they cut one of his feet off. The right, I think.

Sure slowed him down. Mary says it made him a better person. She's always in trouble, one of those people, y'know? You wanna make sure you don't get caught up. It has a way of enveloping everyone. It's because she has this instinct, she knows stuff about people and sometimes they don't like it. You ready for a coffee?'

On the way home I met another half dozen people who were acquainted with Bolivar and Mary Amity. A Greek couple in a dry cleaners. Two old ladies in ratty fur coats who finished each other's sentences. A thin horse-faced man in a floor-length plastic slicker. A cop. I would have expected this sort of thing in an English country village, but it did not seem possible that one woman could be so well known in such a cosmopolitan neighbourhood. From each of them I gleaned another curious piece of information about my hostess, but they confused my picture of her instead of clarifying it. The cop mentioned her recent divorce from 'that writer, the guy who caused all that trouble at Rockaway Beach'. Was this the pianist, or someone else? The couple in the dry cleaners professed themselves glad that Mary had gotten her eyesight back. The horse-faced man asked me if she still had 'the singing hen'.

I returned to the apartment half-expecting to find another stranger sitting in the lounge, but for once it was empty, and I could concentrate on going through the figures I needed to prepare for work the following morning. Or I would have been able to, had the armadillo not clawed them all to pieces and pissed on them. It took me the rest of the day to put everything right, during which time I fielded over a dozen phonecalls from borderline-crazies asking for Mary. Apparently she ran some kind of astrology hotline on her other number Sunday evenings. I don't know the details but I think there was some kind of gambling element involved because one guy asked if he could put thirty dollars on Saturn. Deciding to set her voicemail in future, I finally got to bed just before one, having first locked the rewritten papers safely inside my briefcase.

Sleep did not come easily. My head was full of questions. Why had Mary's first husband killed himself? Why was the second one a maniac?

Why was Dean in jail? Why couldn't I just ignore all this stuff and quietly get on with my own life?

On Monday, Bolivar had to stay behind in the apartment while I went to work, but Raoul and Carlos arrived just as I was leaving.

'Yo! The Chuckster!' bellowed Carlos. 'The new tub is arriving today.

Gonna be some banging.'

'That's fine,' I said, relieved. 'Do your worst. I won't be here.' I stopped in the doorway. 'As a matter of interest, how do you know Miss Amity?'

She had helped the pair out of some difficulty when they were little more than schoolkids, in trouble with the law. Carlos now worked for a security firm and Raoul was a hot-diver. That is, he explained, he was paid to jump into radioactive water at power plants, in order to fix things.

'It hasn't done a hell of a lot for my sperm-count and my pants glow in the dark,' he laughed, 'but the money's good.'